Welcome to our Saturday Sampling, a selection of the week’s riches for your delectation, amusement and well, horror or confirmation as you please:

If you really wish to know, Afghanistan Cost is available here. We leave you to decide the value of any benefit ….

A farmer’s refusal to host a Lesbian Wedding in New York cost him a $10,000 fine plus $3,000 for ‘mental anguish.” Farming sure ain’t what it used to be …neither is New York, for that matter …

California is opening jail space with Early Jail Release of prisoners, some as early as 19% of sentence served. We wonder: Why jail all those folks if you’re just going to release them again?

Doctors are unhappy as government takes over their profession along with healthcare generally. Yeah, sure, so? A lot of them voted for it …

Burger King Corporation is fleeing to Canada to pay lower taxes. Well, naturally! The only folks who don’t appear to understand this, are governments …

The Department of Justice is suing a small Minnesota town for refusing a permit for a Moslem center. The DOJ’s lawyers are in the right place, but they fail to understand that they need to behead the mayor, not sue the town.

A Brain-Eating amoeba has been reported in Louisiana water supplies. You may drink the stuf, we’re told; just don’t sniff or inhale it. While this is disturbing, are there any places that haven’t yet reported the beastie’s presence? For some reason, we’re less confident in government than we once were.

A New Jersey Dog, left home alone, set the house afire. So far, no cat lovers have tried to top this.

Global Warming has reached its Its 19th year of ah, ‘rest.’ Snow presently covers the interior of Alaska … and Wyoming. Still, our governors are ramping up the resources invested in ‘preventing’ it. Could there be MONEY involved?

The NYC Bedbug issue is, rather than disappearing, spreading through the city’s subways.

The Uber ride sharing app has been banned by a German court; it seems to upset taxi folk somehow. We assume autos were banned there for upsetting horses …

The US cannot locate some 6,000 Foreign Students whose visas have expired while they remain in the country … somewhere.

GM will install eye-motion sensors to monitor whether drivers are paying attention to the road. We expect these to be of more use to lawyers after the accident than to drivers beforehand …

Though little reported, Pakistan is approaching a rolling boil as protests against the government mount and people wonder whether the generals will find them an excuse to take over again.

What LGBT people have yet to discover (apart from human rights are for everybody not just minorities. First take the rights from the majority then …) is after they have been used as a stick to beat other people with, what happens to the stick.

Just a theory – those using groups as sticks to beat the majority with, once they have suppressed the majority the sticks will find they have no rights either – and no-one to defend them. The old divide and rule again. I am still a long way from figuring out your American politics. On Jim Lanterns site he has a handy quiz to determine place on political spectrum on which I am placed strongly libertarian with a bias towards socialism. Which I guess in your context would be an independent. That bias towards socialism is fairly English normal. We used to have the best of both worlds, a healthy political mix of Conservatives conserving, and the socialist’s radicalism kept in check. Now we have radical Conservatives ( ye gods!) and conservative socialists – the worst of both worlds. And they both love Europe which in my book makes both sets traitors. Let’s say I prefer democracy to dictatorship, so far democracy has not existed independently of the nation state, and I loathe the taxes being poured down the drain into EU. We are being robbed, conned and lied to, and we are not being told the agenda because most people would reject it. What is interesting in a grim way is the same formulae appear to be being carried out in all the Western nations and European countries. As these are all separate nations that cannot be coincidence. Democracy is starting to look like a tear drop on the face of human history.

Well, a tear … or a pimple! It didn’t save the Greeks; it’s doing pretty well in Switzerland. Mostly,it seems to me, an illusion, especially as the engaged population enlarges.

Technology could address some of the issues I suppose, but too many have interests in preventing that …

Pogo was right.

U.S. politics are simple in the extreme: You have Republicans and Democrats who both want the same things but they want them fpr themselves and not for the other party. And some of their friends are not the same. They rely upon somewhat different lies, though.

And much is illusion management. A famous comment here from a prosecutor was that a decent District Attorney (Our prosecutors) could indict a ham sandwich. And we have proven that we can elect one President, as well …

I liked the illusion, it seemed to work better than what we presently have. The gerrymandering of the boundaries of the political parties, to bring about a situation where we (ruling elite) win and you (everybody else’s) loses whoever you vote for is another coincidence which just happens to be happening everywhere simultaneously. Meanwhile our politicians and legal establishment “prove” black is white and if you disagree you are insane and off to the lunatic asylum to have your view corrected.
The argument we have been taken over by aliens is starting to look credible.

I prefer my illusions over reality too .. it’s my motive for housing them! Your analysis is unarguable and goes down more easily with the humor to flavor it. Or maybe it’s sarcasm, at any rate, it’s decorative. No need for aliens though, when as I am forever noticing: Pogo was right!

(Pogo was a Florida swamp dwelling opossum comic strip character with a philosophical bent. He once declared: “We has met the enemy, ‘an he is us.”)

When we grow up and are ejected from Disneyworld? It is partly a stage of life thing. My parents were generally happy people but looking back now with an old age perspective I can see a sadness in each of them – their disappointed hopes. In my case, my loss of hope is the loss of nearly all I believe in, the values that my parents, late husband and I held,trampled pearls before swine style, by all the powers that be. I reject slavery -totally. The old lessons remain true. Freedom is not a gift, it has to be fought for. One of the bloggers I refer to a lot, I probably disagree strongly on some of his politics, but those of his ilk are upright, courageous and incorruptible and also excellent analytically and strategically. It is hard to fight an enemy you cannot see. But some are better at seeing through the cameouflage. We need the people who can see and expose the enemy and the courage to fight. That is the only hope.

Hope is why we arise in the morning; reality is why we retire at night. Our species seems to need a portion of each. The necessary price of that, is some disappointment along the way … but it should never obscure the satisfactions that also come, or so it seems to me.

We are arrogant twerps who blind ourselves to the obvious: The universe screams of purpose … and that purpose is not ours. If in that, we can say that we did the best we could, we should rest content. (Easter sermon: Church of me.)

I read somewhere that human beings are hard-wired for optimism. Otherwise we would rationally conclude that attachment leads inevitably to disappointment, and when you looked at your children you would see that they are going to die. No reason to relate, produce young or even live. Hope may be one of the necessary irrational elements without which we couldn’t live and would have become extinct. The young are optimistic and the old are cynical. Perhaps that is one of the functions of death – we might give up otherwise.
My hope, what is left of it, is that it is a huge universe, and perhaps out there somewhere is an intelligent moral species who organised their lives with more maturity than we have done. Not every life form succeeds. If we become extinct, which looks likely, we were an intelligent species which failed our intelligence test.

All that universe does seem a bit overdone if we are at all paramount in it …
And Professor Hawking supports your view, stating that we’d best get off the earth before it removes us from existence. You both seem correct; but this view again serves to suggest the primacy of our species over any of its individuals, at least in the long run.
I confess a sneaky, unpleasant suspicion that our brains are decision machines, rendering our vaunted ‘Free Will” an illusion. However, nor does that presume we are predestined either, seems to me. Rather, it implies more of a statistical distribution wherein we can predict what the masses will do most of the time but cannot predict individuals as well.
I think this calls for a second glass of wine when dinner comes ’round …

Yes, I’ve come across that theory that we decide to act before we are conscious of our decision. Interesting, and I am sure the mind manipulators are interested in it too. Terry Pratchett in one of his novels describes a beautiful morning. The sun is shining, everything is green and beautiful, and in the corner of the picture is a fly trapped in a spiders web. It restores perspective. I feel that this universe is good, but we are living in a bad corner of it. But it is us who are out of step, not the universe. We are designed to be egomaniacs. We can’t help but treat our experience as if it is the whole world. Like very small children. I think a bottle on the table is more appropriate. “Rather be merry with the fruitful grape, Than sadden after none, or bitter fruit”. (Omar Kyham)

The “moving finger” has been supplanted by a smartphone that writes and the giant turtle upon whose back the world is ultimately sustained is supplanted by a handful of dark matter but I continue to prefer the original versions too. I’m not sure that the universe, cares. That is where it becomes up to us …

The universe cares? The universe is a big place, are we sure we know what we are talking about here. Also is there only one universe. My answer to that would be religious not scientific. For the sake of argument, accept the religious cosmology that God/the gods created our universe. Stole it out of Chaos according to some versions. The bit the gods do not own is still Chaos (see the original Russian Solaris film) perhaps both the original matter of creation and a dumping ground of everything that fails the law of Order, we call Hell. Our Universe, the God-made one, is created out of love, is Life and life-affirming. Our Universe cares. The alternative, Chaos/Hell does not care. The difference for us in terms of experience would be sipping a piña-colada on a Mediterranean beach or sitting on an Arctic ice-flow naked.

Well, I dunno. That never having slowed any of us one bit, I proceed anyway. What else is there to do, once the environs of one’s navel are comprehended?

Chaos theory finds order in chaos. Order and finite existence are omnipresent to our view. We can’t explain them, so I blame a Creator. Such must transcend the limitations of His creation: space and time, energy. Call him God or Fred, someone has to accept the blame!
A multiverse seems one of the various choices people hold up to replace the aether, such as strings, dark matter and energy etc. which strike me as ways of saying: “Damfino!” As I certainly don’t know either, I abdicate herewith!